A blog post to keep me in the habit of blogging

Reuben's Fall by Sheri Leafgren. This weekend I finished reading Sheri Leafgren's Reuben's Fall: A Rhizomatic Analysis of Disobedience in Kindergarten for the introductory qualitative methods course I'm taking this semester. This is certainly not the sort of book I would have picked up without some coaxing, but I'm glad I did. It attempts to illustrate the focus on obedience in the American school system (particularly in kindergarten) while illustrating that disobedient children are not necessarily "bad" and obedient children are not necessarily "good". The book began as a dissertation (for which I heard it won some sort of award), and that is the version I actually read. I found the dissertation online through the Kent State University website and, because the content is nearly identical to the printed book, I used it as an ebook proxy on my tablet. An added bonus is that the dissertation doesn't use Comic Sans anywhere. [Edit: The typeface used on the cover is Chalkboard, a font that ships on Apple computers. It isn't Comic Sans, but is close (for key differences notice the 'F' and the 'u'). I begrudgingly accept that it is an appropriate choice, though I still don't like particularly like casual, graphic typefaces. The dissertation is typeset entirely in Times New Roman. This seems like a decent resource for more information about classifying typefaces.] All in all, it was a well-written book that unsettled my understanding of obedience in schools, and I'm glad to have read it.

Other recent developments include the election of new officers for the Statistics Club at UF (I didn't run for any positions and need to update my CV) and my return to active tweeting (@TheDougW). Nothing too exciting. I'm just keeping my head down, working on school and side-projects, trying to not stay still for too long. I've got a few ideas for blog posts with content (mostly about software that I use), so those are in the pipeline.

Also, apparently yesterday was World Backup Day (in addition to being Easter Sunday), so go back up your data if you haven't done so recently! Advice from the website: